A quick tip from someone who has burned out launching a product…
A quick tip from someone who has burned out launching a product: Take all your marketing/sales ideas and put them on paper, then subtract 1/2 of them.
For example, I had "2 cold sales emails per week" on my list. I could theoretically do this based on my calendar. But I erased and wrote "1 cold sales email per week".
When you have energy, it's tempting to load up to the max. But for long-term success (and your sanity), setting the right pace is critical.
I'm new to all this, but I suspect that you're spreading yourself too thin. Sending one cold email takes what, 15 mins? If you're doing many little things a week that take 15 mins each, I suspect you might be better off picking the top 2-3 things and going all-in on them.
Partially so that you can see if they're working.
If you send, say, 100 emails a week and you're getting 0 positive results, then you know you're doing something wrong.
If you send 1 email a week and you get nothing... what does that mean?
I think one trick to growing a business early is to focus on learning. If you're doing all these different things it seems hard to learn effectively.
Again, just my two cents.
Good point about focus! I need to keep that in mind.
I didn't want the discussion to be about cold emails, but they take me longer than 15 mins to find prospects, research, and write a semi-personalized email - which is why I'm doing it in small batches.
Getting into opinion land: I personally loathe automated marketing emails (I think there will be massive backlash against them in the future, they're so close to spam) so if it takes me less time to send an email than it would for the recipient to read it and respond, I'm not sending it.
Just my personal feels about that, I know it means I'm less efficient selling.
15 mins might not be right, but I think the idea still holds.
And ya, I get it 100%. I feel the same way about the spammy emails.
This is for my own research (hence me not linking my product), but do you have any other tasks that you would highly recommend to do on a weekly schedule? Things that you did regularly that you should have automated?
Hmm, I'm no expert, but putting my writing schedule into a monthly + weekly breakdown has helped clear my mind a lot. I have a lot I want to write, but I was previously tackling it "when I had time", which meant constantly shifting priorities. Hope that helps!
Thanks for the information. It does help.
Hey Andy -
I've been working on a product nights and weekends during the last 6 months and I'd agree that you have to ruthlessly prioritize the work that you expend effort on.
That being said, If you can't fit in 1 sales email a week, I would reconsider your approach. For example here's a bunch of people on Twitter complaining about how their wordpress site broke, I'd recommend reaching out to them to see if they'd be interested in your product.
You could be right! Thanks!
Hmm... I have 100 cold emails per day... Am curious - why do you only have 1 per week?
I have no idea how you manage that! I'm sending personalized cold emails, not auto-generated. I have other things I'm doing (writing, building, working), so 1/week is just about right!
It's my main goal, so the volume has to be pretty high. I'm using a hybrid approach to this:
1 - spend an hour or so scraping a directory (using the webscraper.io chrome extension)
2 - dump the data into a spreadsheet
3 - pipe that data through hunter.io to get email addresses (if necessary)
4 - the grind begins... for each business:
4a - click the link, find the blog or news section, write a relevant subject line
4b - then find the "about us" page and find the COO, Operations Manager or relevant person. Flag them on my spreadsheet
5 - pipe this data into my mailer, using merge tags to personalise the email
I have lots of boilerplate and process, and as little creative writing as possible.
Curious, how has this approach been working out? Any results?
I've actually only just started on my venture, 4 weeks getting my MVP demo-able and this is the first week of outbound. I'll post an update in a couple of weeks :D
The process is closely modelled on the sales team of my previous job - the outbound team aimed for 250 clean leads per-day. The leads were closely linked to the specific vertical so everyone could unify their language to the sector. This fits nicely with my product Flow VRP, so I'm copying it (with lower numbers)
+1